Kaltura MediaSpace 4.0 Puts Video & Rich Media in the Heart of the Social Enterprise

Open source video platform Kaltura has released Kaltura MediaSpace Version 4.0 -- the newest version of the company’s out-of-the-box centralized video portal. Kaltura MediaSpace allows users to integrate video into social collaboration.

MediaSpace is a customizable, modular solution that includes applications for community- and user-generated content with a customizable look and feel. It also features design templates and options for single sign-on and security.

Kaltura Introduces Social Enterprise Video

With the recent boom in social enterprise tools, video is becoming one of the many instruments being used to empower social capabilities and engage customers across the enterprise. In addition to its most recent upgrade to MediaSpace, Kaltura also responded to this burgeoning trend in March of this year by launching its Social Enterprise Video Solutions, which aim to provide leading businesses worldwide with advanced video and rich media capabilities for collaboration and knowledge sharing among employees, partners and customers.

With the social enterprise suite, employees can create, author, share and search video content while allowing managers and administrators to govern, administer and moderate the content. Its open platform enables organizations to customize the functionalities and user experience, to integrate with various other enterprise systems and to flexibly choose which elements to deploy on-premises or in the cloud.

Enterprise Video: Single or Multi-Vendor

Kaltura offers a comprehensive single-vendor enterprise video solution. However, as detailed in a March 2012 eWeek article, there is debate about whether a single- or multi-vendor approach works best for enterprise video. For example, Hewlett-Packard and Polycom combined their respective networking and video conferencing technologies with Microsoft’s Lync to create solutions officials said would “offer higher-performing, lower-cost unified communications capabilities than single-vendor offerings”. This is in contrast to Cisco, which like Kaltura offers enterprise video solutions using only its own technology.

There is no consensus on which approach is the right one or if either approach is universally superior in every situation. The dispute involves issues such as which approach offers greater interoperability, and which one offers lower cost and time of implementation.

Kaltura MediaSpace 4.0 is available now as a fully hosted solution or as an on-premise deployment.